Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  Paul demanded an immediate meeting with Sir Joe, John and Yoko. It was a very uneasy gathering and I was surprised that John and Yoko, given their stubborn frame of mind at the time, attended. Sir Joe said he didn’t think the pictures were obscene, he had seen much worse, an opinion which confused John and Yoko. They wanted to be seen as avant-garde and enfants terribles. Worse was to come. In his opinion, said Sir Joe, not mincing words, John and Yoko looked revolting. He agreed with Paul that the public’s perception still was that the Beatles were nice kids who had made it to the big time. These pictures would blow that perception right out of the water. John grinned. Yoko squeezed his hand and closed her eyes.

  In the end, as Sir Joseph knew, EMI was able to pull out when the brothers and sisters in the union at Hayes said they wouldn’t touch the Two Virgins album cover with a barge pole, refusing to work on it point blank. Sir Joe called Ron with the good news.

  “They said take it away, we’re not doing it here. I’m afraid this means that while EMI will press the album, we are not able to handle the distribution of this record,” he said, with deep satisfaction.

  For Ron, it was not a case of “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” There wasn’t a person at Apple who didn’t think the album and cover were rubbish. But John, with Yoko goading him from the rear, wouldn’t let it rest there. He nagged Ron ceaselessly until, in the end, Ron roped in Roy Silver, a friend of his who was the unusual combination of being a restaurateur and Bill Cosby’s manager. Roy had a company called the Campbell Silver Cosby Corp. and a record company called Tetragrammaton, run by Arty Mogul and Greg Smith, with such groups as Deep Purple signed to them in the States. However, it was much more complicated than anyone realized; it always is. By innocently asking Roy Silver’s help, Ron opened a hornet’s nest because Tetra’s own pressing and distribution was with the English record company, Track. Track in turn had a similar P & D deal with Polydor, which was part of Polygram—which was owned by EMI. In the end everybody, involved by weirdness of contractual obligation got involved in Two Virgins; and the problem was, since EMI had expressed the opinion that it was pornographic, the others didn’t want to know.

  Soon after, John arrived at the offices with a new idea that I suspect originated either from the large brown envelope that Sky had delivered his prints in, or quite possibly from the plain paper bag that dirty magazines left Soho pom shops in. Whatever it was, the plain brown wrapper from Soho was about to become art.

  “Tone? I want to put the album out in a brown paper bag,” was John’s next less-than-earth-shattering pronouncement. “Oh, and one other thing—”

  “What’s that?”

  Then as my heart sunk, John elaborated on his “best idea of all.” He wanted to make a blue movie to package with the album. The two together would fit nicely in said paper bag, a grab bag of goodies that he was sure would have the record-buying public lining up in droves to purchase. Lining up exactly where, he didn’t say, given that the distribution arrangement was dissolving.

  Nevertheless, urged on by John’s greater vision, we rented a great deal of expensive, very technical camera equipment from Cambridge Scientific, the people who shoot mosquitoes mating magnified four million times, or time-lapse flowers opening once a year on the floor of the Amazon basin, and now, John and Yoko. The high-speed cameras that shot ten thousand feet per second or whatever, were the size of refrigerators, all so John could catch his own erection, or the ideas he had in mind while his mind was elsewhere. Cambridge Scientific was so busy that I could only get the equipment on weekends, when they weren’t using it themselves. When they said that, I wanted to laugh. It was like “something for the weekend, sir?” Why John needed such technical stuff, I’ll never know. I asked him if it was really necessary.

  “Yeah, I’ve read about it, see,” he said vaguely.

  I was given the job of editing the soundtrack from the album to John’s high-speed film even though I told him I wasn’t a high-speed expert. In the end, I got in Ray Millichope of Monty Python fame from the BBC, who understood something of these matters; at any rate, he nodded wisely when I told him what had to be done. We did it, but almost predictably, like Yoko’s “You Are Here” event, the film was not aired. And what was on this expensive high-speed film? John Lennon’s face. I have heard recently that Yoko had released it somewhere or another. I often wonder what the credits on it are.

  I used to dread taking John and Yoko’s arty stuff into radio stations and asking them to play it. For me, it was a bad experience because it was unplayable and unlistenable. Who can you recommend it to? John was on at me to get in there and plug it. So I thought I’d better give it my best shot. The reaction was a bored, “Why are you bringing this crap to us?” At first I argued with radio producers about it, though not on a very artistic level. I even heard myself saying, “Because he pays my wages. That’s why!” It was so embarrassing.

  27

  Probably a sense of being alienated from the world got John interested in heroin originally. As far as Yoko was concerned, if you spout all this magical, healing, antiwar, be kind to everybody, all-seeing, all-caring, all-macrobiotic stuff, being pregnant on heroin would seem to be the last thing she would need. And how does all that stuff equate with shooting up smack? How does all that spiritual pontificating gel with the teaspoon and the needle, unless you’re a fraud? Hunter Thompson once said that if you live with someone who is using the spike, you come to terms with it yourself or split up. So, psychologically it looked more and more like it might have been a power thing on Yoko’s part to draw John in closer to her and farther away from other people. An “It’s you and me against the world now, baby” feeling.

  For us at Apple when we did wonder what was going on with John, it was hard to see it any other way because John used to like life. He used to like to get on a roll. Laugh, eat and drink. Steak sandwiches were his favorite. Any time of the day it was steak sandwiches. But he’d eat anything tasty: proper breakfasts, an old-fashioned fry-up, pie and chips, fish and chips, fried chicken, a roast dinner on a Sunday, Chinese food, curry, spaghetti Bolognese. Everything. Then he met Yoko, grew his beard, and it was every variety of peace possible: hair peace, bed peace, bag peace. From Irish navvy’s food, he went to heroin and macrobiotics. I think if Yoko had said it was spiritual to snort bean curd instead of eat it John would have done it.

  We all thought that Yoko’s way of showing her power was her ability to spend as much of John’s or Apple’s money as she wished, whenever she wished. This was demonstrated by her wasteful caviar phase. It was totally out of whack with what they were spouting about the world, and starvation and peace. John had his beard and said he was Jesus so technically he should have made do with loaves and fishes; but Yoko was too crass. She’d step out of John’s office on the ground floor and autocratically send the office boy—an American student named Richard DiLello—down to Fortnum and Mason’s every day for some of their finest Beluga in that big white enamel pot with the special lid, and the chefs would start making toast in the kitchen. John wasn’t keen on caviar, but they’d ignore the hot toast and feed each other a couple of spoonfuls, get stoned and leave the rest of the pot sitting on the desk with the two spoons sticking out, Or they’d go to a bag-in and forget to put it in the special fridge. Five hundred pounds’ worth, left to rot. Thousands of pounds’ worth of lovely caviar went to waste because Princess Yoko could get a fresh pot the next day. It infuriated the Apple staff. We used to mutter, “So much for those sit-ins, and bed-ins and feeding the starving millions.” We failed to see how you could stop the war in Vietnam by sending a lad down the road to Piccadilly for caviar from posh Fortnum’s. Hair! Peace! Caviar! It didn’t play. But it didn’t bother Yoko, now that she had landed the big fish. She probably thought: “Let them eat toast.” It was Yoko’s way of saying, “You minions get paid thirty pounds a week—and I am richer than any of you now.” She would never have seen the irony in James Bond’s comment in Casino Royale: “The problem with orderi
ng caviar is not that you can’t get enough caviar, but that you can’t get enough toast.”

  When George came in, he’d survey John ’n’ Yoko feeding each other like a couple of cooing love birds, and say cynically, “Yeah! Right on! But don’t leave the lid off yer caviar.”

  We didn’t see much of George because he was mostly holed up in Kinfauns, his home in Esher. I think he had seen the writing on the wall and was looking to the future where his own compositions would be every bit as important as John and Paul’s. This was the period when he wrote and produced a classic, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” on which Eric Clapton played. The song was selected for the White Album. They had started the process of selecting the songs in Kinfaun’s by making twenty-three demos on George’s four-track Ampex mobile machine.

  Many of the songs were wonderfully fresh and original in concept, like John’s “Revolution” and Paul’s “Blackbird”; two others, written by John, “Sexy Sadie” and “Dear Prudence,” were satires based on their experiences in India. Yoko’s constant presence in Esher was unexpected and an irritant, but after the notorious night of May 19 when she’d first spent the night at Kenwood, she and John were like Siamese twins.

  The Beatles started working at Abbey Road—some of which was filmed by me, for the first time, capturing shades of things to come with Yoko still in constant attendance.

  With all this chaos in our lives, it was asking for trouble when Derek Taylor, the press officer, continued to encourage his open-house policy, with half the world dropping into Apple. Cases upon cases of spirits and crates of beer flowed into the press office making it like his old Fleet Street local, an arty El Vinos. Not everyone drank; many smoked dope and hung out. Peter Asher and I tried our best to impose some kind of order, asking the girls in reception and the doorman to filter out the less-welcome callers. Among the less welcome was a young student named Richard Branson.

  As I’ve said, it was another Richard by the name of Nixon who said, “There’s no substitute for perseverance.” Richard Branson, of course, would have been against everything Nixon stood for, but as far as perseverance was concerned, Branson put Nixon to shame.

  I’m sure that Richard has mellowed with time, but in those early days he was a geeky student who drove us all mad. He’d try to get in all the time, hoping to grab some contact with the Beatles and chatting with anyone who wasn’t being too physical with him by helping him back out into Savile Row. Most annoying, but top marks for trying.

  Richard hoped to interest the Fab Four in his student magazine. Well, sometimes, help comes from strange areas and it so happened that around this time, Yoko demanded her own office at Apple; that is, she asked that a desk and a chair be moved into John’s office so she could sit side by side with him. She wanted to learn the ropes. There weren’t any ropes to learn, but Yoko wasn’t to know that. You could see by the determined set of her jaw that by next Thursday—Friday at the latest—she would make a supreme bid for Apple power in the name of either the people, art, or Yoko Inc.

  Branson happened to make it past reception one day and caught John and Yoko. John, being quite sociable, would have a word with anyone. Despite inner groans and sinking hearts from the staff who would have to get rid of these people, he would say, “Come on in, have a chat,” and in the cranks, the unwashed, the loonies, and the others, would come. John, bless him, even held the door open for Richard and the young student shot in and, showing John a copy of his rag, asked if John would answer a few questions.

  “Sure,” John agreed affably.

  Almost unable to believe that he was getting this interview, which in fact was quite a scoop, Richard followed John around for some hours, asking earnest questions until he had enough material. Bolstered by this, he got a bit brave and asked John for a song. They stopped moving.

  “A song?” John said, confused, thinking that Richard meant him to sing something live for his entertainment.

  Richard explained that he wanted a tape that he would press up and give away as a freebie record with the magazine. John loved the word “free”—he even used to stop off at reception and ask hopefully if any free gifts had come in that morning—but with Richard being so eager and persistent, John began to panic a bit and said, “Oh all right. We’ll sort something out for you.” By then, Yoko had had enough of John’s attention being taken up by someone else for so long and she got the heavies to propel the fledgling boy wonder outside.

  From then on, a serious game of persistence set in. We were plagued by this student who wanted a song from the Beatles to give away with his mag. Finally, when it was obvious that John was avoiding him, Richard insisted on having a meeting with Ron Kass, who, in turn, insisted on me handling it. I explained that we did give away similar flimsy records to magazines like FAB and such, but they were organized on a commercial level.

  “You can’t expect to have a Beatles record for nothing,” Ron had said. “They’re under contract to . . . it’s over to you, Tone.”

  “EMI and Apple,” I told Richard. He was very upset and played the children’s ace.

  “But John promised,” he said, bottom lip trembling, pushing his square frames back up his nose. “John’s a Beatle isn’t he? All he has to do is give me a tape and I’ll return it. It’s not like I’m selling it or anything. I told John this was a freebie.”

  “There’s no such thing as a give-away Beatles record,” I said. “We would have to pay EMI royalties on it.”

  But Richard Branson wouldn’t take no for an answer. A reign of “that student’s here again” terror began. The whole building was put on a “Branson watch.” We were all vigilant, except for Derek Taylor, whose office was stacked so high with cases of booze he couldn’t see the door. Branson was in, but Ron Kass threw him out again, saying, “We can’t have this invasion on a daily basis.” John himself was now in such terror that he threatened to sack anyone who let strangers near him.

  On October 18, 1968, Sergeant Norman Pilcher, together with his trusty hound and several uniformed policemen, knocked on John’s basement door at Montagu Square. Eventually, John staggered to the door, looking dazed and unkempt. He’d deliberately kept the police waiting while he telephoned his lawyer. He was late for a press conference at Apple and suddenly genuinely alarmed as he realized the seriousness of his situation. He gazed blindly at the seven burly policemen and the one policewoman—brought along for Yoko—who were standing on the doorstep. Pilcher handed John a warrant.

  “Right lads,” he said officiously. His boys in blue burst in on the double; one of Pilcher’s notorious drug raids was on.

  Neither John nor Yoko should have been surprised, but they were. Heroin is like that—it can make time stand still. Only a couple of days earlier they had been warned about a raid by our old chum, Don Short, who was the chief showbiz correspondent on the Daily Mirror. In a frenzy, John had rounded up Pete Shotton to clean up the flat. Pete went reluctantly because his feelings had been deeply wounded by the arrogant way John and Yoko treated him, calling upon him to clean up the pigsty of an apartment when the mess got to be too much for them. The final straw was when he was expected to do Yoko’s laundry. He had said to John: “John, it’s me, Pete—remember?” before storming off.

  Nevertheless, he was there when John needed him. They’d gone through the flat like a whirlwind, getting rid of the traces of every drug. Pete was carrying out piles of trash when Yoko turned up. “Get rid of him!” she screamed at John. Pete left. If he had remained, perhaps he would have found the various small caches of marijuana around the place that he and John had missed, particularly the larger amount hidden in an old film can under the sink which Sergeant Pilcher and “Sniffer” Willy discovered in the raid, or so it was asserted.

  John said it wasn’t his, he didn’t even know it was there. Possibly it had belonged to Jimi Hendrix, who had also once lived there; but the favorite theory was that it had been planted. This wasn’t too far-fetched. In his zeal to reduce the country’s drug problem
, Pilcher was later caught planting evidence and served some time in prison. John and Yoko were formally charged with possession and of willful obstruction due to the few moments John had spent flushing some drugs down the loo before answering the door. John was allowed to telephone Neil at Apple HQ and the news went round the offices like wildfire. By the time they were marched out to the waiting police cars, looking wan and scared, the press had arrived and flashbulbs popped. At the police station, to save Yoko, who was pregnant, more grief, John took the rap. A few hours later Yoko was rushed to the hospital with an imminent miscarriage.

  We were amazed when Richard Branson turned up at Apple one day toward the end of November with two suits. One was Charlie Levison, a top man at Harbottle and Lewis, and the other suit was Branson’s father, who just happened to be a judge. Harbottle and Lewis—made famous by Goons fans, who would call them Bluebottle and Lewis—also happened to be Apple’s lawyers. While some of us hovered in the background with Goon voices, saying, “You’ll never get out of here alive with a free song! Here comes that student with Bluebottle and Lewis, quick run before we all get deaded,” in the reception area, without a glimmer of a smile Levison explained to Ron Kass and me that young Richard had gone ahead and planned the new edition of his student magazine based on John Lennon’s promise of a free record. He had ordered extra copies and, despite being still at boarding school, had worked very hard—after finishing his Latin prep no doubt—at raking in more advertising because this was going to be his huge, multimillion sale edition.

  We all thought that this seventeen-year-old public schoolboy was threatening to take John Lennon, the Apple Corporation and the Beatles to court for substantial damages with our own lawyers. There was utter disbelief. We were deaded.

  John walked in through the front door in the middle of this row. Yoko had just had a very public miscarriage in her fifth month and obviously John was still anxious and upset. He glared at Charlie Levison.